Chester W. Nimitz

Chester William Nimitz (24 February 1885-20 February 1966) was a Fleet Admiral of the US Navy who served as commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet from 1941 to 1945, succeeding William S. Pye and preceding Raymond A. Spruance.

Peacetime commands
Nimitz attended the US Navy's college at Annapolis between 1901 and 1905 and then served on submarines, becoming the chief-of-staff to the commander of the US Atlantic Fleet submarine force during 1917-1919. During the interwar period he held a number of staff poss, undertook further training, chiefly at the Naval War College (1922-1923) and, as the war clouds gathered in the late 1930s, commanded first a cruiser and than a battleship division with the rank of Rear-Admiral.

By June 1939, Nimitz was head of the Bureau of Navigation, a body tasked with recruiting and training both officers and enlisted men for the rapidly expanding navy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 led to the relief of the then-commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet ten days later, and Nimitz became his successor on the last day of the year. His immediate work was devoted to protecting the highly vulnerable Hawaiian Islandds but in March 1942 he was also given greater responsibility when he was named commander of all the armed forces - land, sea, and air - in the so-called Pacific Ocean Area.

War in the Pacific
Nimitz's immediate aim was to defend what remained of the US positions in the Pacific and maintain communications with the continental United States, Australia, and India. The Battle of the Coral Sea in May effectively stopped Japan's long series of offensives that had been initiated by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Battle of Midway in June then ensured that the US forces held the initiative in the Pacific after severe losses were inflicted on Japan's elite carrier force and its highly trained pilots. Henceforth, Nimitz would go over to the offensive, while the Japanese largely remained on the defensive. To aid the forthcoming campaign, he wholly reorganized the Allied forces stationed in the vast theater of operations, which stretched from the borders of Burma and India to the Aleutians, into a number of separate commands. Although all of these would see fighting to a greater or lesser extent, those zones designated the Central Pacific and Southwest Pacific Areas would be critical to the defeat of Japan.

His subsequent strategy was based on a two-pronged converging drive directed toward the Japanese home islands by these two forces. Aircraft carriers and Marine-dominated amphibious expeditionary forces island-hopped their way through the Central Pacific, while land-based aircraft and shorter-range amphibious assaults by mostly army units carved a path northward through the Southwest Pacific. The eventual aim was to link up in the Philippines before tackling Japan itself. Although there was friction between the two commands over the allocation of resources, the strategy was fundamentally sound.

Douglas MacArthur, who commanded in the southwest and began offensive operations with landings on Guadalcanal in early August 1942, made steady progress through the rest of the Solomon Islands, while the forces of the Central Pacific Area leapfrogged between island groups. Nimitz, who had to assemble the vast naval resources to conduct such complex, long-rage invasions almost from scratch, began somewhat later by tackling the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, then the Marshall Islands in spring 1944, and next the Mariana Islands and Palau during the following summer-fall. Nimitz held operational command in each of these amphibious operations but allowed a number of "fighting" admirals of mostly sound judgment to have tactical control over the actual combat. Many painful, costly lessons were learned, especially on Tarawa in the Gilberts, but the problems relating to tactics and appropriate equipment were soon ironed out. Critically, the huge amphibious task forces were split into various sub-divisions - such as carrier strike forces, bombardment groups, amphibious assault units, and supply flotillas - that had clearly defined but inter-related missions. Carrier strike forces, for example, were often sent ahead to soften up a target, while the bombardment groups operated a little before and during the actual landings proper.

The Central and Southwest Pacific Area forces linked up in October 1944 to invade the Philippines but Nimitz next used Central Pacific Area forces to attack Iwo Jima and then Okinawa in the first half of 1945. These were two of the toughest landings of the entire campaign, but he prevailed and was left standing within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. As the war entered its final phases, he directed operations against Japan itself but the need to invade evaporated after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Nimitz's final act of war was to witness the signing of the official surrender documents on USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.